Cuil founder Tom Costello has published an interesting article (discussed at WebmasterWorld forums) sharing his findings on the differences between Google, Yahoo and Bing search engines.
While the whole article has plenty of smart observations and ideas and is definitely a recommended reading, what I found especially interesting were the differences in how Google and Bing use signals to evaluate the site relevance and quality.
A second major question is whether Bing is using any new signals, beyond what are usually used in search engines. Search engines use traditional signals like title, URL, emphasis/heading, document length and number of occurrences on page to generate an on-page score. They then make an off page score from a count of matching anchors, possibly weighted by the quality of the source page. They combine these scores with some proximity information, and some notion of page popularity (e.g. PageRank). Finally they demote spam and they promote pages that are clicked on for this query more than one would expect.
While Bing doesn’t seem to use any new signals to evaluate the site relevance, its algorithm does have some differences:
- Bing gives stronger emphasis to keywords in URLs;
- Bing seems to give more weight to capitalized terms;
- Bing prefers pages from large sites.
I summarized all findings in a small table (you knew I would!) for you to easier get the idea. However you should definitely check the article itself to look through actual examples and numbers:
| Yahoo | Bing | ||
| Google overlap | - | 25 | 29 |
| The ratio of spam | 2,5% | 4,9% | 2,9 % |
| Signals | |||
| URL matching | moderate impact | moderate impact | high impact |
| Letter capitalization | moderate impact | moderate impact | high impact |
| Differences in SERPs | |||
| Term rewriting | More | N/A | Less |
Thanks for the article Ann. Much appreciated. I really liked the table too my tired eyes are having trouble staying on the lines. Browser zoomed in to the max.
Would you clarify what you mean by capitalization please? Are you referring to body copy or links or the title, or just any old where?
I assume that it’s about capitalization in the text (links, headings as well as the whole body text)
hi Ann Smarty how ru??
Capitalization, huh? That’s an interesting speculation. Why would capitalization make any impact on the SEO value of a page? I can see how keywords in URLs and large websites could affect search rankings, but having capitalization be an influence?
Thanks for the link and summary Ann!
Tanner,
See: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/url-capitalization-and-seo/12667/
Capitalization is an interesting signal to use. Just another reminder to use keywords in headers where it makes sense to capitalize them!
Capitalization == proper nouns, so I can see how they would be of greater value. For example, a search for The Beatles should rank references to the rock band higher than someone complaining about the beatles eating her roses.
The Beatles didn’t eat roses, so any Web pages about them would be unlikely to appear in any search results about gardening, no matter how the algorithm worked. Beetles, on the other hand, feature on a lot of Web pages about gardening.
I agree with jon as capitalization does not going to sound anything bigger or smarter interms of relevance in SE. Instead it leads to another way of stuffing keyword whereever u can (body text, header etc)
I use capitalization on title and keywords and other places wherever they should use capitalization, I think it is quite normal and good for visitors’ reading, maybe this is why Bing emphasise it.
Why to capitalize to do the impact on one page of SEO value? I can find out the key word can influence how in URL and big website to search the grade.
I don’t understand the capatilization concept as we already do some capitalization and if we overdo it then Google might see it as spam.
On url thing I complete agree with Ann that it does have larger impact in bing rather than bing.
*correction : rather than google.
how in URL and big website to search the grade.
Hello Ann,
First of Thanks for Informative Article. wil you clarify what do you mean by “Bing prefers pages from large sites”. .. or Agree with your words “bing prefer capitalization.
In the post itself it is stated large sites like Amazon.com seem to be given preference to
Bing puts more emphasis on “some proximity information” than Tom Costello suggests and tailors results to the user’s location (country) much better than Google, which gives people in the US results from the UK and Australia when they’re looking for local schools (for example) and gives results from the US to people in the UK and Australia who are looking for restaurants (for example) in their own towns and cities.
It seems like Bing is trying to really differentiate themselves with different types of search traffic.
Well I use capitalization by nature on the keyword i wish to focus upon because that keyword is usually a mental trigger to someone searching, who would likely more quickly accept the page. Once they see that keyword stand out in the title or in my headline, of the topic they are searching, they will more likely read on to the rest of the page.
Thank you for that articles! That’s possible for chose Bing or Google for SEO – not included two or three include Yahoo! Search of that
I’m not so sure about ‘Bing prefers pages from large sites’. Seen loads of small websites outranking authoritative large sites on Bing. Guess research was not thorough enough imo :P
First of all i want to say that this is a amazing post i have ever seen. I really enjoy reading your blog. The keyword sniping links are awesome.Keep it up.Thanks for sharing with us such a useful and informative post.
For me there is a big difference in results from Google vs. Bing, so it will be very interesting how to receive traffic from both.
like the article
regars
prasad
http://www.tendertiger.com
Nice post. Could you please clarify how bing uses h1, h2 .. tags. how does bing use them?
Hi nice post,
I suppose Bing has to be different when using its algorythm !
take my website for example i rank pos no.1, 2, 3 for many keywords on Bing and rank pos 60 for google so looking at my analytics i now get 50% of my traffic from bing and 50% from google.
So to me they are worth both the same and my attention is equally divided between them <<<<<<<< know this wont be good for everyone but clever work Bing.
ps. I agree a good domain is key for Bing ranking
oh also Ann do you know anymore about the traditional Signals for Google &Bing on document length?
That question is to anyone really. Cheeers Rich